"Closing
the door gently on World War I. " That could have been the
caption for a fascinating human interest story that appeared on the
Op-Ed page of The New York Times
for Monday, November 12th, this year's designated Veterans Day. The
subject of the essay? The last surviving
veteran from among the two million Americans who served in France in
that cataclysmic conflict. As I read the story my thoughts went
back to a veteran of World War I whom I myself knew a few years ago,
back in the late 1990's, when I was serving as pastor of St. Nicholas
Parish in New Market. His name was Peter- everyone called him "Pete"-
Eischens. I used to visit him and bring him Communion at the Veterans
Home on the bluffs above the Ford Dam. He had a favorite "perch" in one
of the quieter corridors by a window that offered a generous view of an
extensive lawn and some beautiful old trees. He would usually be
sitting there in his wheelchair with a rosary in his hand. Mentally
clear as a bell right up to his last days, he was 102 years old when
God at last called him home.
Pete was a man who detested the brutality of war. I
remember the look on his face when on one occasion he spoke about the
training in the use of the bayonette that he and the other troops
received on board ship as they were crossing the Atlantic. He thanked
God that he never had to make use of said techniques for
disembowelment. But Pete was no pacifist. He was quietly firm in his
conviction that, once war came, it was a citizen's duty to do whatever
he could to make sure that his country would prevail, assuming of
course that the cause to which his country was committed was not
intrinsically evil. Fortunately-and I know that when I say this I will
upset some of those on the ultra-right and most of those on the
middling left-apart from some of our highly questionable intrusions
into Latin American countries our major wars have been and in my
judgment still are morally justified; some were even morally mandated
to oppose the advance of what was indisputably evil.
I was moved by The New
York Times Op-Ed story, and I thought you might be, too. The
report was written by Richard Rubin, who is currently writing a book on
America's involvement in World War I.

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Over
There-And Gone Forever
By Richard Rubin
By any conceivable measure, Frank Buckles has led an
extraordinary life. Born on a farm in Missouri in February 1901, he saw
his first automobile in his hometown in 1905, and his first airplane at
the Illinois State Fair in 1907. At 15 he moved on his own to Oklahoma
and went to work in a bank; in the 1940s, he spent more than three
years as a Japanese prisoner of war. When he returned to the United
States, he married, had a daughter and bought a farm near Charles Town,
West Virginia, where he lives to this day. He drove a tractor until he
was 104.
But even more significant than the remarkable details of
Mr. Buckle's life is what he represents: Of the two million soldiers
the United States sent to France in World War I, he is the only one
left.
This Veterans Day marked the 89th anniversary of the
armistice that ended that war. The holiday, first proclaimed as
Armistice Day by President Woodrow Wilson in 1919 and renamed in 1954
to honor veterans of all wars, has become, in the minds of many
Americans, little more than a point between Halloween and Thanksgiving
when banks are closed and mail isn't delivered. But there's a good
chance that this Veterans Day will prove to be the last with a living
American World War I veteran. (Mr. Buckles is one of only three left;
the other two were still in basic training in the United States when
the war ended.) Ten died in the last year. The youngest of
them was 105.
At the end of his documentary "The War," Ken Burns notes
that 1,000 World War II veterans are dying every day. Their passing is
being observed at all levels of American society; no doubt you have
heard a lot about them in recent days. Fortunately, World WarII
veterans will be with us for some years yet. There is still time to
honor them. But the passing of the last few veterans of the First World
War is all but complete, and has gone largely unnoticed here.
Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised. Almost from the moment
the armistice took effect, the United States has worked hard, it seems,
to forget World War I; maybe that's because more than 100,000 Americans
never returned from it....
The first few who did come home were given ticker-tape
parades, but most returned only to silence and a good bit of
indifference.
There was no G.I. Bill of Rights to see that they got a
college education or vocational training, a mortgage or small-business
loan. There was nothing but what remained of the lives they had left
behind a year or two earlier, and the hope that they might eventually
be able to return to what President Warren Harding, Wilson's successor,
would call "normalcy." Prohibition, isolationism, the stock market
bubble and the crisis in farming made that hard; the Great Depression,
harder still.
A few years ago, I set out to see if I could find any
living American World War I veterans. No one-not the Department of
Veterans Affairs, or the Veterans of Foreign Wars, or the American
Legion-knew how many there were or where they might be. As far as I
could tell, no one much seemed to care, either.
Eventually, I did find some, including Frank Buckles, who
was 102 when we first met. Eighty-six years earlier, he'd lied about
his age to enlist. TheArmy sent him to England but, itching to be near
the action, he managed to get himself sent on to France, though never
to the trenches.
After the armistice, he was assigned to guard German
prisoners waiting to be repatriated Seeing that he was still just a
boy, the prisoners adopted him, taught him their language, gave him
food from their Red Cross packages, bits of their uniforms to take home
as souvenirs.
In the 1930s, while working for a steamship company, Mr.
Buckles visited Germany; it was diffic ult for him to reconcile his
fond memories of those old P.0.W.'s with what he saw of life under the
Third Reich. The steamship company later sent him to run its office in
Manila; he was there in January 1942 when the Japanese occupied the
city and took him prisoner. At some point during his 39 months in
captivity, he contracted beriberi, which affects his sense of balance
even now, almost 63 years after he was liberated by the 11th Airborne
Division.
Nevertheless, he carried with aplomb the burden of being
the last of his kind. "For a long time, I've felt that there should be
more recognition of the surviving veterans of World War I," he tells
me; now that group is, more or less, him. How does he feel about that?
"Someone has to do it," he says blithely, but adds: "It kind of
startles you."
Four years ago, I attended a Veterans Day observance in Orleans,
Mass. Near the head of the parade, a 106-year old named J. Laurence
Moffitt rode in a Japanese sedan, waving to the small crowd of
onlookers and sporting the same helmet he had been wearing in the
Argonne Forest at the moment the armistice took effect, 85 years
earlier.
I didn't know it then, but that was, in all likelihood,
the last small-town American Veterans Day parade to feature a World War
I veteran. The years since have seen the passing of one last after
another-the last combat-wounded veteran, the last marine, the last
African- American, the last Yemanette-until now, we are down to the
last of the last.
It's hard for anyone, I imagine, to say for certain what
it is that we will lose when Frank Buckles dies. It's not that World
War I will then become history; it's been history for a long time now.
But it will become a different kind of history, the kind we can't quite
touch anymore, the kind that will, from that point on, always be just
beyond our grasp somehow. We can't stop that from happening. But we
should, at least, take notice of it.

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As
Thanksgiving Day draws near it's an ideal time to offer public thanks
where special gratitude is due. First of all may I say "Thank
you!" in the name of our parish to those of our parishioners, including
some of our altar boys, who "pitched in" on several recent Saturday
mornings, to transform dingy walls and ceilings in our school's second
floor classrooms and corridors into freshly painted surfaces that are
bright and cheerful and welcoming! Some of you have asked why this work
was not done sooner. The answer is that earlier this year Catholic
Eldercare showed initial interest in converting the interior of our
school building into residential apartments. Eldercare later decided
not to pursue this proposal after estimating that fifty-five apartments
would be needed to make the enterprise viable, a requirement that the
39,000 square feet of our building cannot meet. Had the project gone
forward, the required massive internal restructuring would have
rendered an extensive re-painting program pointless. Now that the
Eldercare project is no longer on the table the repainting now nearing
completion on the second floor has made the building much more
attractive. So once again to those who contributed their time and
effort to this important project: our heartfelt thanks and God Bless
You!

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Thanks are also due to the Deluxe Carpet Company at 1195 East 7th
Street, St. Paul, Minnesota, a regular advertiser in our parish
bulletin. The Deluxe Carpet Company gave us, free of charge, new
internal stuffing for our communion rail kneeling pads. (We have a soon
to be remedied problem with one pad because of a jammed zipper). Our
public thanks to Phil Unger and his Deluxe Carpet Company!

P.S. One of our parishioners has offered
to pay for new external casings for those same kneeling pads. The
project will be completed soon.

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My thanks as well to those of you who have found it
possible to increase your weekly offering to help to defray the costs
of some needed physical repairs in our church building, repairs
centered principally on the church windows.

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And finally-with more than a little embarrassment on my
part-my thanks to all of you who signed the birthday card that you
presented to me on the occasion of my seventy-ninth birthday. I set the
card aside in what I thought was a safe place so that it wouldn't get
lost before I had a chance to write a thank-you note to each of the
signatories. My aging mind is not, it would seem, what it used to be. I
have looked high and low for the card, and for the life of me I can't
remember-nor can I find-where the safe place in which I deposited it
is. May I be forgiven for issuing only a generic "thank you" here and
now? I'm compelled to confess it's the only solution to the problem I
can think of. So to all of you who signed the card, my very humble
thanks on this Thanksgiving Day!